Apologies if this has been one before (I couldn’t find it via search), just thought it would be interesting to see (as I’m debating adding an 11th goal).
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How do you manage 50 and more goals and what they are exactly? Can you share your stories please?
54 goals here! I think my Beeminder journal thread answers this better than I could summarise quickly, but perhaps you have a more specific question? Like… when you ask “how do you manage 50”, do you mean “that seems too much to do in a day/week/month”, or “how do you make sure data gets added on all of them” or… something else? 
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I don’t follow any journal right now, will take a look at yours 
Thanks for sharing.
I am asking about the experience, about your feelings to be honest. Whatever interesting story comes to your mind. How it feels to have 50+ goals.
There are two main thoughts in my head:
I’m interested in how people spend their time and free time in particular. I believe it’s the source of truth about us, since one can do literally whatever during these short periods of time every day. The relationship with the time is different in different cultures in general. It fascinates me. Would you rather learn Japanese or watch Netflix? Why? Etc. It has to be something that makes you, you.
With beeminder we can put some numbers on our free time activities and hopefully get some insight from it. Of course this relationship is indirect.
If you have more than 50 goals I guess some of them must be related to work, chores, some are meta goals or automated goals or where you log data rarely.
Or there’s another option - you have a perfect or near perfect command of your time, tracking it with great attention.
I think there has to be some very rare chronotype, some kind of people that have a timely sixth sense, that can manage their time 10x better than me and I want to learn from that.
Secondly, I’m a beeminder user and I would like to understand what prompted you to set up tens of goals, how it goes, what you learned during the journey.
I don’t have a strong point just yet, but sometimes I think that the ultimate goal should be to actually get rid of beeminder, the less goals the better. I think it’s the awareness of the acratic behaviour that makes you use beeminder. You should beat acrasia, don’t acknowledge it and live with the device that keeps you sane. I’m not sure if it’s true, it’s just a thought.
Also, technically, it should take a lot of time to do beeminder meta work with these goals. How do you do it, what are the techniques to make it less burdensome - it’s also interesting to learn how to do it.
I imagine there must be a small population that tracked a lot of goals and then went back; it’s interesting why.
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Sometimes overwhelming! It’s about the point at which I usually take stock and prioritise and potentially close some of the goals down. But mostly having a lot of goals doesn’t feel any particular way, I suppose.
I’d say I have four categories of goals: work, reading, health, and other. The work/reading/health goals are pretty constant as categories, while other stuff comes and goes. The other category includes stuff like my chores goal, my goal for checking in with friends, study goals, FFXIV goals, gratitude journal… it’s a catch-all for all kinds of things, and goals tend to come and go. The other categories tend to be steadier and contain my longest-running goals.
I have some automated goals, but I have a high value for manual goals, where I have to think of them and consciously add data. Some of my automated goals kind of run the risk of me not realising how much safety buffer I’m losing or gaining.
I would say that for the most part, the problem I’m personally trying to solve with Beeminder is not akrasia (though it is something that comes up now and again), but how I weight the importance of my time or tasks given that they’re all important to me in different ways. and the importance of each goal can fluctuate. For example, I have a goal not to snack after 9pm, but I also have a goal for eating a live yoghurt every day. If they’re both due to derail, which do I pick? Beeminder makes that choice very explicit: I can each time pick to eat the yoghurt (it’s more important) while being reminded that the 9pm endtime for snacks still exists [ETA: corrected typo/unfinished thought] and there’s a long-term cost to flouting it (symbolised by the short-term $5 cost). The externalising of costs is what helps me, because I have so many things I love to do or want to do or need to do,and I need ways to help me prioritise. Sometimes it’s genuinely more important that I play some FFXIV than that I study, for mental health reasons, for instance – but the sting reminds me of the cost of that choice.
(I do still find the akrasia horizon helpful because it also enforces a cooldown time on changing priorities. It makes the choice more significant than just one evening deciding I don’t want to stop snacking at 9pm anymore.)
I do regularly retire goals, though. Because I do a weekly review, I’m fairly constantly evaluating what serves me, what’s working, what isn’t.
It feels like it doesn’t take much time for me, but I’m aware it’s more time than other people would like to spend on it, if that makes sense! I use zzq’s browser extension, which allows me to “collapse” any goal to the bottom of the list. Each day I uncollapse all of them, and work my way through the list, “touching” each one – that could be only long enough to collapse it, or it could mean going and doing the task and entering the data. That means I usually have a good idea of the safety buffer I have, what’s due today, what’s due soon, etc.
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This 1000% – it’s like a naturally-adapting insight into my own real effective priorities, with direct dials to control them.
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Fast-forward 2 months and I realized I now have 50 goals (!)
It’s kind of crazy how well it still works
Only 5-10 things are due any given day (and if it’s 10 usually half of them take < 1 minute)
I don’t have to do anything I wouldn’t normally do otherwise, and I don’t have to do it anymore frequently
So there’s no reason not to use Beeminder for it – because it’s like “hey just do what you would do anyways but with less stress + optimal pacing + you get points!”
And then on top of that I get smoothing, which is amazing.
Instead of alternating between “productive” and “unproductive” days (driven by sleep, medications, mood etc.) – where I do all the chores / tasks on the “good” days and shirk them on the “bad” days, I just do a little of the stuff all the time .
So I feel extra accomplished on the “bad / tired” days, and on the “good” days I’m not burdened by playing catch-up and have more time to focus on the very important things that I’m good at.
So cool.
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